« Gesture Cutting Through Textual Complexity: a Model and a Tool for the Embodied Navigation of Piano Notation »

     Communication dispensée par Pavlos ANTONIADIS (membre du GREAM) dans le cadre du « Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture as Creative Interface », à Universidade Catolica Portuguesa de Porto (Portugal), le 17 mars 2016 de 16h15 à 16h45.

     The proposed talk introduces a model of embodied interaction with complex piano notation and a prototype system for gestural processing and control of musical scores. In the first part, post-cartesian concepts-ranging from Gibson’s ecological psychology, Rowlands’ externalism, Lakoff’s metaphor theory and dynamic systems to Leman’s embodied mediation theory are applied to notations by Iannis Xenakis and Brian Ferneyhough, offering an embodied and extended alternative to traditional interpretation models. In particular, performance will be conceptualized as embodied navigation in a non-linear space of notational affordances, representable as a multi-layered tablature. The act of navigating this space constitutes an example of mediation between symbolic signifcation, action-oriented descriptors and physical energy. In this sense, gesture acts as an interface for notation processing and notation forms part of the dynamic system “body-instrument-notation”, rather than the composer’s “brain in a vat”.The second part proposes a technological application of the model: a recently developed prototype for the processing and control of notation through gesture. This system, by the name GesTCom, implements tools such as Fober's INScore (GRAME) and Bevilacqua's motionfollower (IRCAM). Multimodal data are captured, correlated to the score and mapped on it, transforming it into a personalized interactive tablature. Its uses include: performance analysis and documentation, learning through augmented feedback, further design of interactive multimodal systems.The presentation affrms the centrality of gesture as an interface between physical energy and symbolic representations and hopes to contribute in the discussion concerning the ontological status of gesture and notation in a digitally mediated world.